Grigory Yavlinsky’s web-site, 3.04.2019

Every fifth family in Russia does not have access to a centralised sewage system. But neither the government nor the regional authorities are going to do anything about it. Why? Simply because if they allocate money for sewage, they really have to build it, because sewage has specific consumers – millions of people all over Russia, and they will definitely ask about it. But they are always eager to give Rosneft 400 billion roubles for development of Arctic oil deposits (although the volume of oil reserves in the permafrost has not even been confirmed) or Rostech [the Russian technological corporation for facilitation of development of highly technological products] “the amount that is not to be disclosed”, or [funding] creation of a Russian equivalent of Skype. Because the real costs of these state-owned corporations cannot be checked and, probably, only Igor Sechin [head of Rosneft] and Sergei Chemezov [head of Rostech] know the real cost of their developments.

So, in order to have enough money so that to finance all these “developments”, milking of the budget, an arms race to have enough money, the Ministry of Finance is squeezing money out from the population in one way or another: through taxes, payments, and other fees. It is planned to spend 26 trillion roubles on controversial and inefficient so-called “national projects”. However, the things that are vital for people, such as construction of sewage systems, are certainly excluded from the national projects and are thrown overboard.

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